The recommended way to install setuptools on Windows is to download
ez_setup.py and run it. The script will download the appropriate .egg
file and install it for you.

For best results, uninstall previous versions FIRST (see Uninstalling).

Once installation is complete, you will find an easy_install.exe program in
your Python Scripts subdirectory. For simple invocation and best results,
add this directory to your PATH environment variable, if it is not already
present.

For more advanced installation options, such as installing to custom
locations or prefixes, download and extract the source
tarball from Setuptools on PyPI
and run setup.py with any supported distutils and Setuptools options.
For example:

On Windows, if Setuptools was installed using an .exe or .msi
installer, simply use the uninstall feature of “Add/Remove Programs” in the
Control Panel.

Otherwise, to uninstall Setuptools or Distribute, regardless of the Python
version, delete all setuptools* and distribute* files and
directories from your system’s site-packages directory
(and any other sys.path directories) FIRST.

If you are upgrading or otherwise plan to re-install Setuptools or Distribute,
nothing further needs to be done. If you want to completely remove Setuptools,
you may also want to remove the ‘easy_install’ and ‘easy_install-x.x’ scripts
and associated executables installed to the Python scripts directory.

Questions, comments, and bug reports should be directed to the distutils-sig
mailing list. If you have written (or know of) any tutorials, documentation,
plug-ins, or other resources for setuptools users, please let us know about
them there, so this reference list can be updated. If you have working,
tested patches to correct problems or add features, you may submit them to
the setuptools bug tracker.

The original design for the .egg format and the pkg_resources API was
co-created by Phillip Eby and Bob Ippolito. Bob also implemented the first
version of pkg_resources, and supplied the OS X operating system version
compatibility algorithm.

Ian Bicking implemented many early “creature comfort” features of
easy_install, including support for downloading via Sourceforge and
Subversion repositories. Ian’s comments on the Web-SIG about WSGI
application deployment also inspired the concept of “entry points” in eggs,
and he has given talks at PyCon and elsewhere to inform and educate the
community about eggs and setuptools.

Jim Fulton contributed time and effort to build automated tests of various
aspects of easy_install, and supplied the doctests for the command-line
.exe wrappers on Windows.

Phillip J. Eby is the principal author and maintainer of setuptools, and
first proposed the idea of an importable binary distribution format for
Python application plug-ins.

Significant parts of the implementation of setuptools were funded by the Open
Source Applications Foundation, to provide a plug-in infrastructure for the
Chandler PIM application. In addition, many OSAF staffers (such as Mike
“Code Bear” Taylor) contributed their time and stress as guinea pigs for the
use of eggs and setuptools, even before eggs were “cool”. (Thanks, guys!)

Added experimental environment marker support. Now clients may designate a
PEP-426 environment marker for “extra” dependencies. Setuptools uses this
feature in setup.py for optional SSL and certificate validation support
on older platforms. Based on Distutils-SIG discussions, the syntax is
somewhat tentative. There should probably be a PEP with a firmer spec before
the feature should be considered suitable for use.

Added support for SSL certificate validation when installing packages from
an HTTPS service.

Issue #143: Launcher scripts, including easy_install itself, are now
accompanied by a manifest on 32-bit Windows environments to avoid the
Installer Detection Technology and thus undesirable UAC elevation described
in this Microsoft article.

Pull Request #35: In Buildout issue 64, it was reported that
under Python 3, installation of distutils scripts could attempt to copy
the __pycache__ directory as a file, causing an error, apparently only
under Windows. Easy_install now skips all directories when processing
metadata scripts.

Issue #334: Provide workaround for packages that reference sys.__stdout__
such as numpy does. This change should address
virtualenv #359 as long
as the system encoding is UTF-8 or the IO encoding is specified in the
environment, i.e.:

PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8 pip install numpy

Fix for encoding issue when installing from Windows executable on Python 3.

Issue #323: Allow setup_requires requirements to supercede installed
requirements. Added some new keyword arguments to existing pkg_resources
methods. Also had to updated how __path__ is handled for namespace packages
to ensure that when a new egg distribution containing a namespace package is
placed on sys.path, the entries in __path__ are found in the same order they
would have been in had that egg been on the path when pkg_resources was
first imported.

Issue #299: The develop command didn’t work on Python 3, when using 2to3,
as the egg link would go to the Python 2 source. Linking to the 2to3’d code
in build/lib makes it work, although you will have to rebuild the module
before testing it.

Issue #183: Symlinked files are now extracted from source distributions.

Issue #227: Easy_install fetch parameters are now passed during the
installation of a source distribution; now fulfillment of setup_requires
dependencies will honor the parameters passed to easy_install.

Issue 99: now the standalone easy_install command doesn’t uses a
“setup.cfg” if any exists in the working directory. It will use it
only if triggered by install_requires from a setup.py call
(install, develop, etc).